2017年11月23日 星期四

__________________________________

The Term “Mongγol” Revisited

Kam Tak-sing甘德星

Landscape at the confluence of the ErgüneRiver and the ShilkaRiver
. Photo by Wei-chi ren, 2005

V. MONGΓOOL: GEOGRAPHICAL FEATURES

If my hypothesis is correct, there is good reason
to assume that the term Mongγol, which is cognate with the hydronym Wang-chien, is derived from the
indigenous Mong Γool,[1]the river
proposed by Banzarov.[2] According to Kowalewski, the word mongmeans‘riche, opulent; fougueux, impétueux’,[3] the Mong Γool, as such, must have been a fast-flowing
river. This interpretation is
corroborated by the fact that the Ergüne River, especially the section from Chi-la-lin 吉拉林 (or Shih-wei) to Lian-yin 連崟,[4]
where the early Mongols are known to have settled,[5]flows
rapidly.[6] The name Kiyan (Kiān)[7]乞顏 (kǐət
ŋan),[8] one of the
two legendary Mongol groups that migrated to the Ergüne Qun, the Mongols’
homeland, echoes this thesis. According
to Rašīd-al Dīn, Kiyan means in Mongolian ‘a rushing torrent from the mountains’.[9]
Moreover, the geographical features of
the Ergüne Qun, which, as pointed out by Rašīd-al Dīn, means ‘sloping cliff’, are
faithfully reflected by the steep slopes that characterize this particular
section of the Ergüne River （figs. 2 and 3）, as the present-day toponym Lian-yin,
which reflects the hilly terrain of the region, also suggests.

The use of the word γool in the ethnonym may seem to contradict what I have
noted earlier, i.e., it first appears only in sources published after the 13th
century, such as theMongγol-un ni'uča tobča'an and
the various Sino-Mongolian glossaries.
Nonetheless, the naming by the Tibetans of a river south of the Kokonor
as Jima Gol~Khol (Ch. Ta-fei Ch'uan大非川[10] < Mo.
Dabu(sun) γool[11]) in the seventh century
demonstrates beyond a doubt that the term γool was in use during T'ang times. This Mongol vocable must have been brought by
the T'u-yü-hun吐谷渾, a Hsien-pi group,[12] when they migrated from
Mongolia to the Kokonor area in the fourth century. The fact that the Dagur language, which preserves the Middle
Mongolian forms, has the same word γol, adds credence to our argument.[13]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1]Another possible derivation is Möngke Γool, i.e., an ever-flowing river that provided the early Mongols with a reliable source of water. The change from Möngke Γool to Mong Γool can be deduced as follows. Owing to haplology, the syllable -ke in möngke was dropped when merged with the following γool, which was contracted simultaneously to become -γol. The ö in the first syllable of the merged word, because of vowel harmony with the resultant -γol, was further changed to o through regressive assimilation. Though a tantalizing alternative, Möngke Γool is a less likely derivation than Mong Γool because of the complicated process of linguistic change involved.

[2]It is interesting to note that one of the tributaries draining into the Hei-lung-chiang is known as the Mo Ho 漠河 River (or Mu Ho 木河 in Ming times) and that the County named after it is known to have been inhabited by the Shih-wei people. [See Mo Ho hsien-chih 漠河縣志, ed. Wang Shu-ts'ai 王樹才 (Peking: Chung-kuo ta pai-k'e ch'üan shu ch'u-pan she, 1993), pp. 1, 57-6, 107, 657]. However, no reference is made to this river in T’ang sources, and its medieval reading mak γa (Kuo, Ku-yin, pp. 17, 26) does not quite match the term Mongol.

[5] Recent archaeological discoveries provide evidence that the early Mongols lived in the Ergüne River basin. Their presence is confirmed by the tree-trunk coffins found in the vicinity of the confluence of the Shilka River and the Ergüne River (fig. 1). These coffins, which date from the 8th century to the 9th century, are hollowed out of a massive log, and are typical of those used by the Mongols who later nomadized the Eurasian steppes. The Russian archaeologists who discovered these coffins in the late 1980s call the culture they represent the Dabsun culture. Similar dugout coffins dated around the 10th century have been discovered in West Wu-chu-erh西烏珠爾 and Hsieh-erh-t’a-la謝爾塔拉north of Hu-lun Lake, showing the Mongols’ gradual migration southward. It is from the Hu-lun Lake region that the Mongols moved further west and settled in the Onon River basin since the 10th century. See Lin Mei-ts’un林梅村, Sung Mo Chih Chien 松漠之間（Peking: San-lien shu-tien, 2007）, pp. 256-57, Chung-kuo she-hui k’e-hsüeh yüan et al., Hai-la-erh Hsieh-erh-t’a-la mu-ti海拉爾謝爾塔拉墓地 (Peking: K’e-hsüeh ch’u-pan she, 2006).

[6] Rivers in this area flow swiftly. A tributary of the Ergüne now known as the Chi-liu River激流河, as its name suggests, is one such example.

[9] Shi Chi, vol.1 part 1, p.252. The Mongols’ penchant for evoking a hydronym to name themselves is also evidenced in the term Činggis, which is derived from the Turkic word teŋiz, meaning ‘ocean’. See Gerard Clauson, An Etymological Dictinary of Pre-Thirteehth Century Turkish, p.527.

[10]Christopher I. Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 33, note 109. Note that γool was not used by the Turks to mean river in the T'ang period as Beckwith claims. See Clauson, Etymological Dictionary of Pre-thirteenth Century Turkish, p. 715, where it is noted that kö:l (g-) is ‘never used for “sea”, or for “river”’.

In Companions in Geography Mario Cams revisits the early 18th century mapping of Qing China, without doubt one of the largest cartographic endeavours of the early modern world. Commonly seen as a Jesuit initiative, the project appears here as the result of a convergence of interests among the French Academy of Sciences, the Jesuit order, and the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661-1722). These connections inspired the gradual integration of European and East Asian scientific practices and led to a period of intense land surveying, executed by large teams of Qing officials and European missionaries. The resulting maps and atlases, all widely circulated across Eurasia, remained the most authoritative cartographic representations of continental East Asia for over a century.

This book is based on Dr. Mario Cams' dissertation, which has been awarded the "2017 DHST Prize for Young Scholars" from the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Division of History of Science and Technology (IUHPST/DHST).

Intermission One: Missionaries or Mapmakers? The Mapping Project and its Place in the Mission
Justifying Missionary Involvement
The Unauthorized Return of Joachim Bouvet
Conclusion

2 Of Instruments and Maps: The Land Surveys in Practice
2.1 Beyond the Passes: Observations and Calculations
2.1.1 New Qing Cartographic Practice along the Great Wall
2.1.2 Revisiting the Manchu Homelands and Northern Frontiers
2.1.3 Strategic Expeditions into Korea and Tibet
2.2 The Logistics in Mapping the Chinese Provinces
2.2.1 Moving South: Sequence, Timing and Strategies
2.2.2 Directed from the Center: The Emperor and His Administration
2.2.3 Team Composition and Local Support
2.3 The Imperial Workshops Connection
2.3.1 Mapmakers from the Inner Palace
2.3.2 European Technical Experts and Assistants
2.3.3 The Logistical Centrality of the Imperial Workshops
Conclusion

Intermission Two: Missionaries and Mapmakers: Missionary Activity during the Land Surveys
The Restitution of Church Buildings
The Impact of the Chinese Rites Controversy
Conclusion

Conclusion: Unlocking Dichotomies: Revisiting Cross-cultural Circulation
On Qing Imperial Cartography: Traditional vs. Scientific Practice
On the Role of the Individual: Global vs. Local Networks
On Instruments and Maps: The Circulation vs. the Production of Knowledge
On Interculturality: China vs. Europe

References and Bibliography
Index

----------

Biographical note
Mario Cams, Ph.D. (University of Leuven, 2015), is Assistant Professor at the University of Macau’s Department of History and specializes in the history of early Sino-European contacts, late imperial China, and the history of cartography.

CONTENTS

Foreword Borjigidai Oyunbilig（i）
FUTAKI Hiroshi—Bibliography Compiled by Sajirahu（1）
The Rise of Qaidu and the Expansion of the .gedei Family in Central Asia Sun Wenbo（11）
An Inspection and Narration of Aisin Gurun’s Granting Herding Lands to the Monglian Tribes that Had Pledged Allegiance to the State Sachuraltu（23）
Two Manchu Memorials to the Throne and the Culture of Using Seals in Qing and Chinese Ethnic HistoryChia Ning（39）
A Discussion on the Decline of Kharachin Three Banners’ Banner System: Based on a Survey ofSumus’ Population Zhu Sa（57）
An Inquiry to the Mongol Autumn and Court Assizes during the Qing Mongolkhuu（73）
On the Relationship between Gushri Khan and the Early Qing Imperial Court M. Erdenebaatar（103）
A Study on the Three Letters to the Mongolian Rulers by the Fifth Dalai Lama Wei Jiandong（117）
An Exploration and Analysis of the Formation of Juu Uda League and Its Problems during the Qing Based on the Archival Materials Housed in Ongnigud Right Banner’s Printing Office Yu Hai（129）
An Investigation on the Qing-Badakshan Relation in the Middle of Emperor Qianlong’s Reign (1760-1767) Ma Zimu（139）
Spreading Rumors as a Strategy in Competing for Influence in Tibet between Jungarian Khanate and the Qing CourtUlaanbagana（151）
A Limited View on the Relationship of the Qing Court, Dzungar Khanate, Tibet, and Ladakh in Early 18th Century Centering on Ladakh Lama Gajin Rincin Chen Zhu（169）
A Brief Analysis of the Value of Collection of Translated Letters in Manchu under Qianlong’s Reign as a Historical SourceDu Jiaji（191）
Da Lama Lobszangjanzan’s Tod Mongolian Memorial to Emperor Qianlong in 1772:A Forgotten Piece of History M. Erdemt（203）
A Study on the Memorial by Taerbahatai in Its Relation with the Qing Court’s Frontier Policies Regarding Northern Xinjiang during Emperor Jiajing’s Reign (1522-1566) Hua Li（213）
On Two Rare Texts Related to the Cultivation of Mongolian Wasteland in the Era of Republic of China (1912-1949) Tuimer（229）
On the Stele with Both Chinese and Manchu Inscriptions Dedicated to the Manchu Vice-general Bushuku of Plain Yellow Banner Zhang Kang（237）
The Ts. Dambadorj Depicted in the Works on the General History of Mongolia Liu Dinan（245）
An Attempted Discussion on the Mongolian Therapy of Bonesetting from an Interdisciplinary Perspective of Medical Anthropology and Medical History Saijirahu（253）
The Indictment of Ong Qa’an: The Earliest Reconstructable Mongolian Source on the Rise of Chinggis Khan Christopher P. Atwood（267）
The Influence of Mongol Beliefs on the Law in the Mongol Empire Florence Hodous（303）
A Study of the Sixteenth Century Mongolian Term Qon.in Borjigidai Oyunbilig（317）
On the Social Conflicts of Two Jarud Banners: Centering on Several Cases in the Late 19th to Early 20th Centuries Oyungerel（335）
A Study of Duke C. Jamiyan’s Request for Tibetan Buddhist Canons from King Nayant J. Urangua Г.Bayarmaa（345）
A Study on Inner Mongolian Herdsmen’s Life after Their Being Resettled KODAMA Kanako（367）
A Reexamination of the Chinese Translation of Owen Lattimore’s China Memoirs Narangerel（375）
FUTAKI Hiroki, a Renowned Japanese Scholar in the Field of Mongolian Studies L.Chuluunbaatar（389）
“The Regulation of Ministry of Foreign Affairs” and Its Social Background: A Case Study on the Event of Burning Chinese Houses in Khalkha Mongolia in the Third Year of Emperor Daoguang’s Reign SATO Noriyuki（393）
“Contracts” and “Certificates” in Eastern Inner Mongolia: Centering on the Historical Documents of Qaracin Right Banner in the Early 20th Century HIROKAWA Saho（419）
Cultural and Educational Activities in Mongolia in the Republican Era: Centering on the Years between 1912 and 1932 Naheya（437）
The Strategy the Qing Government Adopted in the Kyakhta Meeting Husel Borjigin（451）
A Study on the Compilation of Mongolian Textbooks in the 1920sOyungoo（465）
Cognition, Representation, and “Excessive” Knowledge about Terrains of Mongolian Pastoralists: A Case Study on Harhorin Sum,rhangai Aimag, and Mongolia KARASHIMA Hiroyoshi（477）
The Forgotten Natural Forests: A Case Study on the Hunshandake Sandy Land Naran（491）
Saichunga and Toyo University TOBA Baikal（505） List of Contributors（517）

2017年10月16日 星期一

Memorial Minute

At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on February 2, 2016, the following
Minute was placed upon the records.
RICHARD NELSON FRYE
Born: January 10, 1920
Died: March 27, 2014
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, to Swedish parents, Richard Nelson Frye was raised
in Danville, Illinois. As a freshman in high school, on the way to his after-school job
as ticket seller in his father’s movie theater, twelve-year-old Richard spotted a book
in the window of the town’s only bookstore: Harold Lamb’s Tamerlane, the Earth
Shaker, which, as he put it, consumed him to the extent that he decided the study of
Central Asia would be his life’s goal. He went on to study Oriental history at the
University of Illinois at Urbana in 1935, serving in the ROTC and studying Arabic
language at a summer school at Princeton University in 1938. Upon finishing his
undergraduate degree summa cum laude in 1939, he began his graduate studies at
the Department of History at Harvard, where for two years he studied Chinese
language, history, and archeology.
In the fall of 1941, as a naval officer, he was persuaded to learn Japanese but then was
called to Washington, D.C., to join the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), manning
the “Afghan desk” as part of a team of Near East specialists. After intensive training
in cryptanalysis, he was assigned to Afghanistan, where he went carrying with him his
Ph.D. thesis, a translation of Narshakhi’s History of Bukhara. Once in Kabul, he was
allotted the teaching of mathematics at Habibiya College (1942–44) since Daniel
Ingalls, future Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard, with whom he had traveled,
had arrived before him and had preempted all the English classes. Frye traveled
extensively in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia, amassing the intimate
knowledge of this region that he would draw upon later in his career.
Frye left the OSS in 1945, returning to Harvard, where he was admitted as a Junior
Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the spring of 1946. That fall he received his
Ph.D. in the field of Oriental history. His advisor, Robert Blake, then “put him to
work” on classical Armenian. Together they also translated the medieval Arabic
account of Ibn Fadlan’s travels up the Volga, on which Frye’s student, the novelist
Michael Crichton, based his book Eaters of the Dead, which subsequently became
the 1999 film The 13th Warrior.
When he found he was unable to study Iran and Central Asia intensively at Harvard,
Frye began studying old Iranian languages with the great Iranist Walter B. Henning
at the University of London, having obtained permission from the Society of Fellows
to be away from Cambridge “because of the disruptions caused by the war.”
Returning to Cambridge, he taught an anthropological survey of the Near East and
continued his studies in classical Armenian, making contacts in the Armenian
community, which led to his co-founding of the National Association of Armenian
Studies and Research. Thanks to his advocacy, Armenians have established Armenian
scholarly studies throughout the United States, beginning with a named chair at
Harvard’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.
Frye conducted his first research trip to Iran in 1948. In his third year as a Junior
Fellow, he received several job offers, including ones from the Universities of
Pennsylvania and of Michigan. With these as leverage, he secured a joint
appointment at Harvard as Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and of
General Education.
In 1952 Frye accepted a request from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to catalogue
the Persian manuscripts in the collection of Hagop Kevorkian, with whom he
became friendly and whom he persuaded to endow a chair in Iranian studies at
Columbia University. Frye taught at Columbia for one year but then decided to
return to Harvard, where he was promoted to associate professor in 1954. The
Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard was founded that year, and Frye
managed daily operations there. His students over the following years included the
Aga Khan’s grandsons Karim and Amin and their uncle Sadruddin, whom Frye
consulted on the possibility of establishing a chair in Iranian studies at Harvard.
Sadruddin told him to write to his father, who wrote back, “Where should I send the
money?” The Aga Khan chair of Iranian was duly established in 1957 with Frye as
the first incumbent, a post he held until 1990.
During his long Harvard career, Frye served as visiting professor or scholar at the
Universities of Frankfurt (1959–60), Hamburg (1968–69), Shiraz (1970–76), and
Tajikistan (1990–92) and was Director of the Asia Institute in Shiraz from 1970 to
1975.
At Harvard, Frye taught entry-level courses on Iran and Zoroastrianism that served
undergraduates and graduate students in fields related to these subjects. Many of his
graduate students have continued in academia and made signal contributions to
Iranian and Central Asian history.
In 1972, he co-founded the Harvard Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies,
which he chaired from 1983 to 1989 and which has produced doctoral students in
fields reaching geographically from Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet to modern
Eastern Europe.
Among his numerous publications are The History of Ancient Iran (1984), a
comprehensive history of greater Iran, including Afghanistan and Central Asia, and
three other valuable historical surveys: The Heritage of Persia (1963), The Golden
Age of Persia (1975), and The Heritage of Central Asia (1996). His fascinating
autobiography, Greater Iran: A 20th-Century Odyssey, appeared in 2005. Many of
his books have been published in several major languages, including Russian and
Persian.
From his fifty years at Harvard and forty-one years on its faculty, Frye left his
colleagues with an indelible memory of a unique personality. He cared deeply for his
students and possessed vast knowledge that he was always ready to share with
colleagues here and elsewhere. He was renowned wherever he went for both his
good humor and his outspoken opinions.
Richard Nelson Frye died on March 27, 2014. He is survived by two of his three
children from his first marriage and a son, Nels Mishael, with his second wife, Eden
Naby.

In the summer of 1948, Richard N. Frye was nearing the end of a postdoctoral fellowship in the Society of Fellows of Harvard University when he
traveled to southern Iran, making his way by mule to the village of Sar Mashhad. Frye battled drought and sandstorms but, with the help of native Qashqai people, was able to climb a small cliff to collect an impression of an 800-word stone inscription written in ancient Pahlavi — one of the largest found in the Near East.The discovery was one of many significant events during the trip. Though Frye fell severely ill from the intense heat of Buzpar, near the Persian Gulf, he also came across the only known replica of the tomb of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae. Soon after, he traveled to Tehran, where he encountered scholars, politicians, and literati tasked with developing a modern Iran. One such scholar, linguist Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda, gave Frye the title “Irandust,” meaning “Friend of Iran.”

The professor took pride in the designation and sometimes used it as an added surname. Yet as a polyglot who was born in 1920 in Birmingham, Ala., and raised by Swedish parents in Danville, Ill., and whose scholarly career spanned six decades and half as many continents, Frye was in many ways a friend of the world.

Frye, the Aga Khan Professor of Iranian Studies Emeritus, died March 27. He left behind three sons, one daughter, and his wife, the Iranian-Assyrian scholar and Columbia University Professor Eden Naby.

Frye, who was sometimes called “dean of the world’s Iranists,” joined Harvard’s faculty in 1948, where he helped create the University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and in 1957 was named its first chair of Iranian Studies — a post he held until his retirement in 1990. Prior, he had earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Illinois in 1939 and master and doctoral degrees at Harvard in 1940 and 1946. He spent a short time studying at Princeton University and the University of London, received an honorary degree from the University of Tajikistan, and held posts at Columbia, Frankfurt, Hamburg,

the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and Pahlavi University in Iran, where he directed the Asia Institute from 1970 to 1976. He also spent four years serving in the Secret Intelligence branch of the Coordinator of Information, the wartime agency that preceded the CIA.“In his generation Richard Frye was a giant among scholars of Iranian studies. He spanned the entire range of Iranian studies from prehistoric times to the present day,” said Gurney Professor of Islamic History Roy Mottahedeh, who noted Frye’s participation in a variety of scholarly activities, excavations, and surveys, some of which remain standard in the field. “He was a colorful figure wearing plaid Russian shirts and carrying to seminars a sandwich in his pocket. We are unlikely to see again scholars of his breadth in the field of Iranian studies.”

Frye published more than 20 books and 150 articles, including the classic and illustrated “The Heritage of Persia” and the introductory “The Charisma of Kingship in Ancient Iran” (1964). Though his research focused on the cultural history and languages of Iran and Central Asia, it, like his travels, often crossed boundaries. In recent years, Frye wrote reflections on the distractions of modernity, on peace amid ethnic conflict and on preserving humanity and its varied cultures in what he called “the age of machines.”

“Richard Frye was one of the last, and one of the most colorful, of a number of Harvard teachers who came here just before or just after World War II and never left for long, if at all,” said Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies William Graham. “To sit in a class of his was always an adventure: He was a colorful man with many brilliant and sometimes quite quirky, but always stimulating, observations on history, religion, peoples, and places. He delighted in almost everything, from colleagues to languages — and he had a great many of both.”

Perhaps it would be fair to consider Frye home both at Harvard and in Iran, where he spoke of willing to be interred. Upon his return from that country in 1948, Frye settled into his study at Kirkland House to translate a squeeze-paper impression of his new-found Pahlavi inscription. His relationship with the Kirkland community, where he was an honorary associate, continued until his death.

“[Sprightly], witty, formidably informed, Richard Frye brought to Kirklanders — students and peers alike, tutors and members of the Senior Common Room — lucid assessments of the interactions of Islamic and Western culture,” said Master of Kirkland House Tom Conley, the Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Visual and Environmental Studies. “He had the gracious gift of drawing cultural lines of divide in pastel, never indelible ink. Richard was one of the very few persons we have known who brought intellectual delight in playing at being crusty and curmudgeonly, and all of us are the better for it.

2017年10月14日 星期六

At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences May 5, 2009, the following Minute was placed upon the records.

Omeljan Pritsak was a man of seemingly inexhaustible energy, broad erudition, and total dedication to scholarship in a broad range of fields. While he will probably be best remembered at Harvard and in the Ukrainian diaspora community as the co-founder and long-time director of Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute, his energy, erudition, and scholarship also found expression in a prodigious output of scholarly work and in institution-building in several countries and many scholarly fields. He was founder, editor, or an early stalwart of a number of periodical and monographic series—first in Germany, then in this country, and, ultimately, in his native Ukraine. His prodigious range and productivity is only partially captured by the published bibliographies of his works.

Pritsak was born on 7 April 1919 in Luka, in the Sambir region of Ukraine, and completed his secondary education at the Polish “First Gymnasium” of Ternopil’, where for some years he was the only Ukrainian student. His higher education, with a concentration in Ukrainian and, increasingly over time, Turkic history and philology, took place at the University of L’viv, at the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv, and, after World War II (during which he became first a Red Army soldier, then a prisoner of war, then an Ost-Arbeiter), at the Universities of Berlin and Göttingen, the latter of which awarded him a doctorate in 1948.

Pritsak was invited to visit Harvard University for the academic year 1960–61 and returned to Harvard as Professor of Linguistics and Turcology in 1964. He retired in 1989.

By the time of his arrival in Cambridge, Pritsak had already become an internationally recognized specialist in historical and comparative Turkic and Altaic linguistics and a leading authority on the history and cultures of the Eurasian steppe. He was the first scholar to solve problems of succession in Turkic tribal royalty, especially in the first Turkic Islamic dynasty of the Karakhanids. At Harvard, he turned increasingly to the analysis of the Ukrainian past in its larger context, drawing on his training in the relevant oriental languages to flesh out that history with material previously underrepresented or unknown.

In 1967 Pritsak proposed the creation of a firm foundation for the development of Ukrainian studies at Harvard through the establishment of three endowed chairs (history, literature, and philology) and a research institute. This project was accomplished thanks to the efforts of the Ukrainian Studies Fund, which raised the necessary funds within the North-American Ukrainian diaspora community. The Ukrainian Research Institute was founded in 1973 and Pritsak became its first director. In 1975 he was named to the new Hrushevs’kyi Chair in Ukrainian history.

In most of his work, Pritsak was very much a structuralist. Therein lay the basis of his close collaboration with Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), especially in the International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics (The Hague: Mouton), which Jakobson edited in the mid-1960s. Pritsak also took a very pronounced structuralist view of genealogy and chronology—although his interest in these fields may have originated with some adolescent discoveries about his own birth and parentage.

He could overreach himself, as specialist reviewers of his The Origins of Rus’ (Harvard 1981) have been quick to point out. He was impatient with critics, spending very little energy in engaging with their views. He insisted that the cultural history of the East Slavs (and for him political institutions were a part of cultural history) must be viewed in the broadest Eurasian terms, taking fully into account the experiences of Scandinavian, Turkic, Baltic, and other Slavic peoples and sources in their languages.

The great majority of those who challenge Pritsak’s conclusions on the origins of Rus’ themselves view history in primarily “national” categories, but—despite his dedication to Ukrainian history—he explicitly did not. It is true, however, that when asked by one of those signed below why his projected book on the Origins of Rus’ would be in six volumes, he is said to have replied, “Because Ochmanski’s ‘Origins of Poland’ is in three.”

In one of his last general articles on the subject, he was particularly direct: “The history of Ukraine is not the history of the Ukrainian ethnic mass (ethnicity is not a historical subject) but the objective view, measured in linear time, of all types of states and communities which existed on the present territory of Ukraine in the past.”

Nor was he a “Normanist,” as is sometimes alleged. While his inaugural lecture in the Hrushevs’kyi Chair began with the story of the uproar caused by Gerhard Friedrich Müller’s 1749 lecture, “Origines gentis et nominus Russorum,” and his later work stressed the role of Scandinavians (among others) in the founding of “Kyivan Rus’,” he steadfastly insisted that the entity that emerged in the eighth and ninth centuries was multi-ethnic and multicultural at its core.

After retirement, Pritsak became more involved in the post-Soviet struggle for the revival of academic historical studies in Ukraine, spending increasing amounts of his time there (despite a serious cardiac condition that had led to surgery as early as 1977). He became the first elected foreign member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, and revived the Institute of Oriental Studies in Kyiv, introducing new university-level programs in that field and many other neglected areas of historical scholarship. Sadly, however, even a man of his astuteness and dynamism was unable to escape the tangled webs of post-Soviet academic politics and intrigue: these years were filled with disappointments.

By that time, however, Pritsak’s major work had been accomplished. It has transformed our understanding of East Slavic history. Never again will any serious historian of the region be able to treat the history of this space as anything but the history of—in his words—a “multiethnic and multilingual” society.

Omeljan Pritsak is survived by his wife Larysa Hvozdik Pritsak; by his daughter, Irene Pritsak (by his late first wife, Nina née Nikolaevna Moldenhauer); and by two grandchildren, Lailina Eberhard and Michael Wissoff.

2017年10月10日 星期二

Joseph Fletcher (1934-1984) exerted a tremendous influence on the development of the fields of Chinese and Central Asian history, the scale of which is all the more noteworthy for the brevity of his academic career. Endowed with a remarkable aptitude for foreign languages, wide-ranging interests, and a passion for teaching, Fletcher spent nearly the entirety of his academic career at Harvard. He earned his A.B. from Harvard in 1957, was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows from 1962 to 1966, and received his Ph.D. from the Department of Far Eastern Languages in 1965. He then joined the faculty of Far Eastern Languages as an assistant professor in 1966 and was promoted to Professor of Chinese and Central Asian History in 1972. He remained in this position until his untimely death, from cancer, on June 14, 1984.

Fletcher’s studies of Central Asia and the Inner Asian frontiers of China were enabled and augmented by his linguistic talents. In addition to the languages of Western Europe, he also read Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Mongolian, and Manchu. He brought all of these languages to bear on his scholarship, which covered a wide range of subjects stretching from the forested coastlines of Manchuria to the mosques of the Middle East. His dissertation, completed under the tutelage of his mentor Francis Cleaves, was a close textual study of the seventeenth century Mongolian chronicle known as the Erdeni-yin Erike. He worked extensively on problems related to the history of the Qing Empire, and was among the first to argue forcefully for the integration of Manchu sources into the historiography of China’s final dynasty. His contributions to the Cambridge History of China were widely acclaimed for demonstrating the importance of the Inner Asian frontier to the governing consciousness of the Qing rulers, and thereby balancing the earlier tendency to focus on coastal interactions with the West as the primary window through which to understand Qing foreign relations. In his later years he turned to the subject of Islam in China, working particularly on the connections between eighteenth century Chinese Islam and widely Islamic currents in Central Asia. Although he never finished a book, he published dozens of articles and prepared many more manuscripts that remained unpublished at the time of his death. Some of these were subsequently edited and released by his former colleagues and students.

A dedicated teacher, Fletcher taught Manchu and Mongolian, graduate seminars in Inner Asian history, and a popular general education course for undergraduates on the history of Mongol Empire. Despite being diagnosed with terminal cancer, he continued to teach through the final year of his life, and passed away less than a month after submitting grades for the spring semester. In 1983, he was awarded the Levinson Teaching Prize, an annual award given to the best teacher of undergraduates at Harvard University.